Chapter 4, Wushidao/Bushido Explained

"Be empty of yourself!" Bodhidharma's directive had been a tough one for the Emperor to wind the Imperial brain around. The Emperor, unfortunately, was not to be alone in his predicament. All Mahayana Buddhists, regardless of rank, discover its confusing difficulty whenever they recite the Heart Sutra: "Form is not different from Emptiness. Emptiness is not different from Form." What does it mean to be empty and what does whatever it means have to do with the martial arts?

Essentially, Form is Samsara, the world of the ego. It is history, Greenwich Mean Time. It is Maya, the pleasing illusion of permanence, our erroneous notion that matter's form and constitution are fixed, that our own egos are as stable as the Matterhorn.

Maya is the conditional world. Under certain conditions water becomes ice. When the conditions change, it may become steam. Somewhere between solid and vapor we encounter liquid which, we arbitrarily decide, is water's normal state. Atoms of hydrogen and oxygen do their little molecular dance and laugh. Who are we, they wonder, to decide what is normal?

We see a rock and wax poetic about its eternal properties. Years pass and when gross inspection of the rock reveals no alteration, we are reassured. A geologist would see change as clearly as a farmer counts upon it; but we don't care to look. Rocks are what we build our faith upon.

We form a bond with an individual and think we know him and his face. We fix his character and his features in our mind, certain that they will be as indelibly etched in time as they are in our memory. Years pass and when we see the person again, we're so startled by the changes our suspicions are aroused. What destructive force... or behavior... wrought such premature decay? Naturally we are annoyed if the person whose facial lines we so have so carefully mapped regards our own face as so much terra incognita. Perhaps, we wonder, he has an ulterior motive for deliberately failing to recognize us.

In Samsara, all things are in flux. We cannot step into the same river twice. The water keeps flowing: new molecules rush to rub up against our sneakers as old molecules sigh with relief for having survived the ordeal. Our mind changes just as continuously, acquiring new data and forgetting old, and forming upon shifting data bases those evanescent opinions which it regards as solidly based convictions. No matter how many of us agree on the nature of another person's character, or on our own, or on the properties of an observable phenomenon, both the observer and the observed are changing, all our certainties to the contrary notwithstanding. Ultimately, we can rely on nothing. Samsara is the ego's world of conditional relationships. Samsara is our hell.

Emptiness is Nirvana... and what Nirvana is empty of is ego. Without the seductions of a fickle ego, reality lacks the incentive to transform itself into illusion. Nirvana may be entered when we are in elevated states of spiritual consciousness or in any true state of meditation during which, by definition, the ego has been transcended. In the sense that we are still physically present whenever we enter the egoless state, Nirvana and Samsara may be said to occupy the same place. But Nirvana consists in another "meta" physical dimension, a dimension which contains Plato's Ideal Forms, and the Tushita Heaven's Bodhisattvas and Buddhas, and the empyrean Void. Nirvana is the eternal, egoless world of unchanging and therefore reliable reality. We cannot gain Nirvana through hypnotism, drugs or quietism. Among the ranks of spiritual heroes, we seldom find supper club hypnotists, potheads, or zombies. We gain Nirvana through purging ourselves of self- interest. Pride, lust and greed have to be sacrificed in the interests of ecstasy. Prideful passions must be replaced by compassionate humility. Add to this a little Grace, and we're home free. Nirvana is our heaven.

In Nirvana, we become emotionally independent of those persons, places, and things of the world to which we previously affixed the adjective "my". We no longer identify ourselves in terms of our relationship to them. This independence does not mean that we do not care, it means that we do not possessively care. Instead of having friends, we are merely friendly.

Here, in part, is the Code of Wushidao/Bushido, the Spiritual Way of the Warrior:

"I have no parents; I make heaven and earth my parents. I have no friends; I make my thoughts my friends. I have no enemy; I make carelessness my enemy. I have no armor; I make goodwill and honesty my armor. I have no fortress; I make my Immovable Mind my fortress. I have no sword; I make my sleeping ego my sword. I have no magic; I make submission to Divine Will my magic. I have no miracles; I make the Dharma my miracle."

How does a man exist without parents and friends, we wonder. Why is it necessary that he cut himself off from the people he loves? Surely, we say, no great world religion such as Buddhism would ever impose such harsh conditions on its followers. But here is Jesus on the subject: Gospel of Luke, Chapter 14, Verse 26:

"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple." Hate? We cringe at the word. But Jesus is speaking metaphorically. In Buddhism this metaphor is further exaggerated but in the extension becomes more graspable: We say that we must kill those we love. The following Zen story illustrates this requirement:

Upon being told by his master that he must cut himself free of all emotional entanglements and 'kill' those to whom he is emotionally attached, the novice asks, "But my parents, Master? Must I slay them, too?"

The master answers, "Who are they to be spared?"

"And you, Master? Must I kill you also?"

The master responds, "There is not enough of me left for you to get your hands on."

This, of course, is the egoless state, the only state in which we can love unconditionally. In the egoless state we care for people without meddling in their lives. We reject all sentimental, contractual relationships which lull us into comfortable illusions of security or press us into compromising our integrity.

In religious terms, the ultimate object of both Zen and the martial arts' training is the conquest of the ego. A man has to realize that the arts of war which he practices in the Dojo are first and foremost the tactics and stratagems of a battle that rages within his own soul. This is how he conquers himself. The Code of the Warrior, therefore, is an innocuous enumeration of the sacrifices which flesh must make to spirit, a restatement of the creed of worldly non-attachment which, in one form or another, exists in all religions.

How do we attain the goal of emptiness? Just as we grasp with the whole hand and not with one or two fingers, we make a many pronged attack upon the problem, approaching it from many angles.

We first accept the spiritual regimen which Wushidao's Code prescribes, realizing that it is an integral part of a discipline which is known and observed in all the world's great religions. Spiritual soldiers are hardly unique to Buddhism.

Wushidao, however, is antithetical to pseudo, pantheistic nature religions and it is unambiguously opposed to any form of ancestor worship including all forms of Confucian-style deification of human forebears. Nana and Pop-Pop do not reign over the Dharmakaya.

Yet, however strongly the concept was presented in Luke 14:26 and elsewhere in the New Testament, the western world found the concept unthinkable when it was presented in Buddhist terms. The reason for this is clear: the doctrine had been corrupted by the militaristic regimes of Japan.

When Zen entered Japan in thirteenth century medieval times, it was immediately drafted by the Samurai. It was still suffering this conscription when a series of Zen monks compiled the Hagakure ("Hidden under the leaves"), a rewriting of Wushidao principles which conformed them to the requirements of militaristic schemes. According to the new version, Bushido, the Zen martial artist's singular objective was honor, by which it was meant doing nothing shameful, i.e., doing nothing to embarrass one's ancestors, who, as it happened, were always ardent supporters of whichever Shogun or Warlord was employing the Zen martial artist. Dishonor, which was to be avoided at all costs, was equated with the fear of death. Therefore, for a man to be really honorable, he had to actively seek a proud and honorable death. Buddhist humility was no where in sight.

The Hagakure version of the Way of the Warrior thoroughly confounded and compromised the original doctrine and set the stage for sundering what the Buddhist world had thought was divinely joined: Zen and Wushidao.

The sundering was accomplished in World War II.

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